Software
With the N5550 hooked up and the three Western Digital RED drives installed I finally had a chance to boot everything up and to take a peek at its software. Once I reached the IP of the device, I was greeted with a fairly basic and clean login screen. There is also a flash version of this same page, personally I found the flash version to be a little harder to figure out though. It does look much better, but without clear labels as to what each option does it takes some getting used to.
Before doing anything else, it was important to get the hard drives installed and formatted and, in our case, setup the RAID. This way I would be able to play around with every option and later also put the N5550 to the test to see how it performs as well. Thecus does give you an easy way to setup your RAID using a wizard, as you can see below they just ask you simple questions and then it sets everything up for you.
With our RAID setup, we are now free to explore the rest of the N5550’s interface. The first thing that stood out to me was the notifications up in the top right corner of the screen. Much like a facebook notification, Thecus has set it up to let you know if there are any problems. In this case, I put in the wrong password and one of our notifications was letting me know that someone attempted to log in with the wrong password. Its normal for all NAS drives to track this sort of thing, but putting the notifications in an easy to find location like that does help bring attention to them and show their importance.
As for the rest of the layout, the N5550’s interface was similar to what we have seen from its competition. On the left side of the page you have six sections, with each having multiple options to work with. For example, system information has general, status, system log, online registration, syslog management, system monitor, and hardware information. All of those options are important ways for you to get updates on the N5550’s status, performance, and even details on the hardware inside. All of those options are important but maybe not something you would check every day, breaking them up under System Information as a whole keeps the interface from being to cluttered.
Opening each of the six sections closes the other sections, personally I would love to be able to open one or two at a time and minimize the others. This way you can flip to what is important to you quickly.
The best option listed in the first section is the system monitor, from here you can monitor both with graphs and normal numbers the N5550’s performance both over the network as well as memory and CPU performance. You even have options to watch fan speed and NAS temperatures to make sure that it isn’t overheating in the location that you store in. This is especially important to me because ours is in a closest with a server and two other NAS’s and two laser printers. It’s easy to forgot about your devices and just assume they are safe because they are still running, this way you can double check to make sure you aren’t causing any damage due to temperature’s.
Moving down into the system management section, I came across an option that caught my interest, called scheduled on/off. This option allows you to set times each day for the N5550 to be on and off. This is interesting especially for power usage but also just for the wear and tear on the drives and NAS itself. For a business, they could set the NAS to power on just before opening time and stay off overnight and over weekends when it wouldn’t be getting any use. In my situation where I can be found working day, night and weekend depending on my schedule, it would never work out. But it’s great that they include that as an option.
The network option was fairly basic, with the normal options to set your IP on both of the two network ports. They do include support for link aggregation to be able to use the two network ports together as one for more speed but unless you are running SSD’s in the N5550 that will most likely not be an issue, although with 5 hard drives as hard drive speeds increase it is still getting close.
What I did find interesting were the little things. Under storage>disc information I found it very helpful that when you mouse over one of the drives listed that it shows you where in the NAS the drive is located. This may be a small thing, but when you have a drive in a raid, the last thing you want to do is remove the wrong drive and break your RAID entirely.
Also under storage, you have the ability to mount ISO’s stored on the NAS. This allows you to burn ISO’s of all of your important software discs and to just run them right off of your NAS, just like in the old days when we would see CD drive arrays. The difference being, this is much smaller and it is also will perform much quicker.
Even when using a NAS and RAID it’s always good to consider ways to backup your backup. Thecus has given a couple different options. First you have their data backup wizard that allows you to setup a backup to a remote Thecus NAS, another NAS on your network, or even Amazon’s S3 service. The cloud option is especially interesting to me. It’s great to see this included right with the N5550. No matter what you go with, they have made it simple to do with the wizard.
If none of those options will work for you, another option you have is the old school way of backing up to dvd’s by using a USB DVD burner. Thecus supports this with its data burn option. This also starts to explain why the N5550 has so many USB ports, Thecus has packed in a lot more functionality than our other NAS’s.
The last but most interesting functionality of the N5550’s software is its ability to add modules. You can find those modules both on their website and through outside forums that use their API. From Thecus you have the following list of modules
Access Guard module
Dashboard Module (for iphone support)
Dropbox module
ElephantDrive module
HiSSH module
IP CAM module
Local Display module
Mail server module
MySQL module
NZB module
Piczza! Module
Raid Replication Module
Rsync backup module
T-OnTheGo and Transcoding service Module
Transmission (BT Client) Module
Twonky media server module
USB & eSATA schedule backup module
VirusScan module (McAfee Antivirus )
Web Server module
WebDisk module
That is a hell of a list just from them alone. A few notable modules are the Dropbox, Local Display, virus scan, transmission, and webserver modules. With just the modules provided by Thecus, you can run a full web server including a database as well as download your torrent files using the NAS itself. The local display option is especially interesting because it puts to use the HDMI output built into the N5550 and allows you to run a mouse and keyboard while being hooked to your tv. This lets you control the N5550 as well as gives you full media playback options, meaning the N5550 could double as your HTPC if needed.
When digging into the 3rd party options for modules you will find anything else you could ever imagine really. I even found people running their Minecraft servers on their NAS! Other interesting options are different multimedia suites like XBMC, VCL, and Plex, Usenet grabbers, even mumble servers. The options are almost limitless really.
When playing around with the module ability of the N5550, I was a little disappointed in how easy it is to set these up. I would understand it from the 3rd party modules, but when installing the dropbox module for example. You have to logout of the control panel and log into the module section to setup your modules. This made the process more complicated than I would have liked. But considering the selection of modules you have to work with, it’s still worth it. Hopefully Thecus will work on making this easier in the future though.